LocationTech/May22 2012

This meeting takes place at the Location Intelligence Conference, May 22-23, 2012 - Washington, D.C.

Time and Location

Tuesday, May 22, 2012 @ 1pm EDT - Room is behind AGSI/table B on the Map.

Attendees

The following people attended:

• Andrew Ross - Eclipse Foundation
• Dave McIlhagga, Paul Spencer - DM Solutions Group
• Xavier Lopez - Oracle
• Chris Holmes, Eddie Pickle - OpenGeo
• Geoff Zeiss - Autodesk
• Thierry Badard, Luc Vaillancourt - Spatialytics
• Michael P. Gerlek (mpg) - OSGeo, Flaxen Consulting
• Phil Bogdan - RadiantBlue (2nd half due to speaking conflict)

Regrets sent:

• Justin Lokitz - Autodesk
• Jody Garnett - uDig

Absent:

• Tyler Mitchell - Actian
• Craig Statchuk - IBM

Minutes

This is a meeting for those interested in the LocationTech Industry Working Group forming at Eclipse.

Quick row call

• See attendance list for details

Vision/Mission/Roadmap/Charter

• This was a very productive session with much enthusiasm and great ideas discussed. It is difficult to capture the energy & high level of interest in a wiki page.
• It was also important to have this strategic discussion face to face. It proved very effective. The following summarizes some key outcomes:
• The group decided to focus on a well thought out architecture and well curated code in specific focus areas. This approach was preferred rather than a "big tent" approach to collect just any Location based project.
• In general, the group wished to focus on forward-looking technologies.
• The group decided on 4 focus areas: 1) Mapping & especially mobile. Recognizing enhancing Desktop & web will continue to be important. 2) Data capture, processing, and exchange 3) Aggregating data from diverse sources 4) Model based design
• A project providing Location processing capabilities based on Hadoop, and a project enabling BIM model exchange were particularly important to the group.
• The group decided to focus on re-usable libraries at first.
• The group decided EPL as a default/recommended license made sense given it's business-friendly attributes. Related Video on the EPL (9 minutes)
• Other licenses like MIT/BSD are expected to be possible as well. More on this soon.

Relationship with OSGeo

• We touched on some of this topic when discussing the vision/mission/roadmap/charter for the group.
• Andrew clarified that on one end of the spectrum, the group might simply consume OSGeo technology (like how the Eclipse Orbit project snapshots, scans, and serves software from outside Eclipse today for example). It was agreed this would be a missed opportunity to really drive Location technology hosted at OSGeo today forward.
• The group felt a complete merger with OSGeo & use of the same name/brand/logo made no sense and wasn't worth pursuing.
• Not surprisingly given many of the group's involvement with OSGeo, there was a lively discussion of value to projects from being at OSGeo. No need to air dirty laundry here as this is really an OSGeo matter. Naturally the group would like to see good things for OSGeo hosted projects.
• The group acknowledged that a) There has to be value for projects at OSGeo to consider moving b) The projects themselves may very well decide to move for their own reasons
• Michael wrote a truly inspired & well reasoned summary to the OSGeo board that should be read. Michael's email
• Andrew cautioned that further OSGeo discussion at group meetings will likely be kept succinct. As well, the group will not be involved in back office (accounting, incorporation, etc) clean-up at OSGeo - that really isn't our concern. The group's relationship with OSGeo was a very important topic. We've discussed, agreed on a proposal for a good way forward. Michael noted that OSGeo will have to decide how to respond and that's an OSGeo matter.

Introduction to PDAL

Michael P. Gerlek [20 minutes] <= deferred until next meeting.

Next Steps/ Next month's call

The next call will be on June 19th at 4pm EDT

Future topics

• Step through the charter - likely in a dedicated call
• Technology survey - we fast tracked this with this meeting, however there's still value in surveying the wider ecosystem
• Introduction to PDAL
• Projects: GeoScript, hadoop based project TBN, BIM project TBN, uDig, GeoScript, JackPine
• Introduction to web sockets